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发帖数: 17722 | 1 Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs
By Greg Smith
March 14, 2012 "New York Times" -- Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs.
After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at
Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I
have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture,
its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now
is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.
To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client
continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about
making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most
important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to
continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined
right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I
identify with what it stands for.
It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a
vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork,
integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The
culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to
earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money;
this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with
pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around
today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working
for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.
But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and
mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected
as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our
recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around
the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading
in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the
thousands who applied.
I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students
in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.
When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect
that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the
president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I
truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the
single most serious threat to its long-run survival.
Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the
largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in
the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in
the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a
trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients
to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the
firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs.
Another sign that it was time to leave.
How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership.
Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right
thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently
an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence.
What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “
axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the
stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are
not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In
English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of
whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman.
Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that
is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to
trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.
Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of
exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one
single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s
purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you
were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would
believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought
process at all.
It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.
Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer
to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even
after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire
Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t
know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch
lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the
simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s
goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.
It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients
don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn
’t matter how smart you are.
These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about
derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me
every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are
observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project
10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure
out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room
hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid”
doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.
When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or
how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the
ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to
know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success
and what we could do to help them get there.
My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South
Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national
finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in
Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work,
with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts
and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore.
I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client
the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make
money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no
matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right
again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care
only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its
clients — for very much longer.
Greg Smith is resigning today as a Goldman Sachs executive director and head
of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the
Middle East and Africa.
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